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Green worked for 36 years for GM and Delphi, including three years managing its Columbus plant, steadily earning his pension throughout his career.

But during the 2008-09 auto bailout that saved GM and perhaps the U.S. auto industry, Green was a casualty: He lost 42 percent of what remained of his pension; he already had lost a chunk in 2005, when Delphi declared bankruptcy.

Green is one of about 20,000 salaried Delphi retirees, including 5,000 Ohioans, who saw their pensions cut by up to 70 percent in the aftermath of the GM bankruptcy.

For five years, the group has fought in court to have the pensions restored, and many now are engaged in a fight on a second front: getting a renewal of a tax credit for health insurance that helped many of them. It expired on Jan. 1.

There’s little to indicate that their fight will end soon. But they say they are disinclined to give up now.

“We’re manufacturing people,” Green said. “We deal with problems all the time. And we get things done.”

However, an observer says it might be a losing battle.

“I don’t think they’re going to get any relief from the government, particularly at this stage,” said Norm Stein, a law professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

In 2009, the federal government gave GM a $50 billion bailout in exchange for the company going through a quick bankruptcy and restructuring.

Delphi, a key parts supplier spun off by GM as an independent company in 1999, was pulled into the restructuring.

As part of its restructuring, GM agreed to restore, or “top up,” the pensions of Delphi’s union retirees. But GM cut the salaried retirees’ pensions by 30 to 70 percent.

The reaction from Delphi’s salaried retirees was a collective howl, a protest that became an issue during the 2012 presidential campaign.

Rep. Mike Turner, R-Dayton, complained that the Obama administration, which had a hand in the bankruptcy negotiations, had picked “winners and losers” in the bailout, caving in to political pressure from labor unions while throwing salaried employees under the proverbial bus.

A 2013 report from a special investigator seemed to confirm Turner’s accusations, finding that the Treasury Department had played a powerful role in the bankruptcy negotiations and felt inclined to restore union retirees’ pensions lest it run afoul of the union and cripple any chance of the industry agreeing with the final negotiations. But the department felt less inclined to restore the salaried retirees’ pensions.

Responding to the special investigator's report, Timothy G. Massad, assistant secretary for financial stability for the Treasury, said that the report made clear that GM's decision to top-up pensions for union employees but not salaried employees "was driven by sound commercial reasons."

Nevertheless, the report makes a number of judgments and characterizations, particularly with regard to the decision-making process, that we do not believe to be supported by the facts stated above, or any others in the report," he wrote then.

The report was validation for retired employees, but one year later, little has changed.

Chuck Cunningham, a Delphi retiree from Warren in northeastern Ohio, said the Delphi salaried retirees are still fighting in two courts to get information from the government about how their pensions were taken away.

On April 7, they will have a hearing in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., on whether the Treasury Department is obliged to hand over documents that the salaried retirees have requested. They have a similar request before a court in Michigan.

“We believe our pensions were improperly terminated,” Cunningham said. “We believe there was a method to do this, but Treasury didn’t want to do it that way for a variety of reasons.”

But Stein said their prospects for success are grim.

“In one sense, the salaried employees are right,” he said. “This really wasn’t fair. But fairness is not the governing legal principle.”

Even as they make their case in courts, they’re also arguing to Congress for the extension of their health-insurance tax credit, one intended for those whose jobs were sent abroad or who saw their defined-benefit pension plans taken over by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. The credit helps those who retired or were forced to retire who were too young for Medicare.

This month, Ohio’s two U.S. senators and seven members of its U.S. House delegation signed a letter urging an extension of the tax credit.

Without the credit, they wrote, “these salaried retirees face financial hardship with up to 50 percent of their remaining pension going to fund their health-care premiums.”

Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, said extending that credit is a priority. “I’m working very hard to make sure it is” included, he said.

Both he and Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, are members of the Senate Finance Committee.

“I’m fighting to have it included,” Portman said. “I certainly haven’t given up on that.”

Portman also said he’s hopeful that the government will ultimately hand over the documents that the salaried retirees are seeking in court.

“These are people who are fighting a government that frankly took away their financial security,” Portman said. “And they have a right to know why.”